Why Flip Sites? Reasons Why Selling Your Domain Make Sense

If a site is making good money, why would you want to sell it? This is a good question, especially if you’re looking for a long term business that will receive dividends for years to come. Following are some reasons why you should consider flipping your site, even if long term profits are what you’re after.

Getting a Premium For Your Skills:

Not everyone knows how to build a profitable site. It takes a larger skill-set to build one, than to maintain one. Getting those vital links that were necessary to rank your site well, branding the site, the keyword research, the on-page SEO balance — all of these things are a large, diverse set of skills that not everyone has. There are people that want a portfolio of online sites, where their only option is to buy them, because they don’t know how to build them. Because of this, they pay a premium.

Scalability:

Because you know how to make a site profitable, you could feasibly outsource aspects of the process, as you oversee and assemble the elements necessary for ranking. Though outsourcing is an excellent way to achieve scale to your processes, eventually it can be overwhelming to manage so many sites. By selling off profitable sites, you can leverage your efforts to build new ones.

Risk Management:

Let’s face it, Google is fickle. Legitimate sites are struck down by Google’s algorithms every day. There is no guarantee your site will forever make the money it does today — therefore, by continually selling off your sites after they achieve profitability, you minimize the risk of potentially losing everything. Keep in mind that savvy buyers know this. It is crucial that your link building be flawless, in order to entice potential site buyers.

Freed From Maintenance:

Sure, you could build a profitable portfolio of sites online, but keep in mind that those sites need to be actively maintained. You must constantly add content, build new links, and actively manage the site’s SEO in order to maintain your rankings. You also need to keep yourself familiar with all of Google’s continually-changing algorithms, so that your sites don’t get penalized. This can be overwhelming as the size of your portfolio increases — and the easiest way to minimize this maintenance is to flip sites.

Huge Paydays:

A site that makes a mere $150 per month can score a one-time fee of $2400. If you happen to get your site achieving $1000 per month, it’s feasible to flip it for 16 months income, or $16,000. The question is — can you build another money site quicker than 16 months, especially with a large influx of capital and your time freed from maintaining that old site? If so, flipping your site makes sense.

Here are some advices to help if you’re considering flipping your site:

Don’t make the site too profitable.

I know that sounds weird. Consider a site that you pour all your effort into, to have it achieve $7000 per month average income. At 16 months income, that is $112,000. That is simply too much risk, more than most investors are willing to take. Instead, consider flipping a site before it makes $1000 per month. At 16 months, a $1000 site would be around $16k. Put yourself in the mind of an investor — they would rather buy 7 sites that each make $1k, rather than 1 site that makes $7k — so their risk is managed better, and they’re not putting all their eggs in one basket. Instead, if you’re able to put together one site that makes $7k — consider spreading your efforts between many smaller sites if you want success in flipping.

Curb appeal is essential.

It’s not all about profitability. A buyer has to feel good about their purchase. You can help that by selecting the right niche. One of the most difficult sites that I’ve tried to flip was a site that sold sex toys. Though profitable, it was a seedy enough selection that the potential buyer pool was greatly reduced. It took a half a year before the site eventually sold. While I made more money in the long term that way — I still bore the risk of its profits plunging, and was responsible for maintaining the site that much longer.

Maximize your site, then move on.

When executed properly, your site will focus on a set of keywords. After you’ve achieved perfect rankings with those keywords, it is time to flip the site. You certainly don’t want to sell yourself short. If you have many pages, where only half are ranking for your desired keywords in the top 10, it makes sense to develop the site further. After it’s achieved the best rankings for its pages possible, then it is time to consider selling the site. Selling before you’ve achieved the best rankings for your desired keywords is leaving money on the table.

Next, you should consider how you want to sell the site. There are two main methods that I have experience with — Flippa and Empire Flippers. If you consider yourself a salesman and want to have a high degree of input and decision making when it comes to the sale of your site — Flippa is for you. If you’re someone who would rather focus on building sites, and let someone else worry about selling them — Empire Flippers is a good place to sell your site. I know the owners of Empire Flippers. They will do a good job selling your site, and getting 16 months income, for what it has averaged the past 3 months.

From a buyer’s perspective, many people love and enjoy Empire Flippers, because they vet the sites before hand. They also get a premium, which is good for you (but some buyers may not care for it). Someone knows, when shopping at EF, that they’re getting a site that has been researched, verified and is profitable. Things like the link building process that was used to make the site profitable will be fully explained.

You never know what you’re getting on Flippa. There are sites featured there which are scams, where the buyer gets burned and loses everything. While EF will vet a site’s profitability, often on Flippa you’re left to your own devices to ascertain how profitable a site is. Empire Flippers, in many ways, was the response to the scams and the worthless sites posted on Flippa that people need to weed through, in order to see any good potentially profitable sites mixed in.